Month: February 2011

Base Strategy

by digby

After it was revealed that Haley Barbour was trying to whitewash Jim Crow there was a lot skepticism when I wrote that he is running for president using a Southern Strategy in both the primary and the Nixon/Reagan sense of the world. But the evidence is mounting:

Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), a potential presidential candidate, appears to have marked a line in the sand for an expected presidential run sure to be dogged by the politics of race and the legacy of the Civil Rights Era in his state. Asked by reporters today in Jackson, Mississippi, Barbour not only refused to denounce efforts by some to create a license plate honoring Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. He said he was out of the denouncing business altogether.

“I don’t go around denouncing people,” said Barbour, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports. “That’s not going to happen. I don’t even denounce the news media.”

Barbour also added: “I know there’s not a chance it’ll become law.”

It seems to me that a truly clever candidate could be more subtle than Barbour’s been so far, but I think it’s tough in this crowded field. If you’re going to specifically go for the Southern Republican racist vote, you’ll need to be fairly explicit if you want to stand out.

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Still Selling Nasty

by digby

Yesterday I noted that CPAC didn’t seem to have been selling quite as many nasty items as they usually do. But Mike Stark caught one that’s particularly creepy:

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, what do you suppose they think he’s done that’s illegal? Is it the birther thing? Or is it just the idea of putting black men in chains that seems like such a natural image?

Stark also got some great footage of famous wingnuts trying to explain why CPAC had a gun ban. Check it out.

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Writing Off Real Americans

by digby

It looks like the Republicans have decided they don’t need the votes of any people who work for the government or any of their families:

If House Republicans succeed in cutting tens of billions of dollars in discretionary spending over the next six months, some of the most immediate victims will be federal employees, many of whose jobs will be slashed as their agencies pare back.

At a press conference in the lobby of RNC headquarters Tuesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) shrugged this off as collateral damage.

“In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs,” Boehner said. “If some of those jobs are lost so be it. We’re broke.”

Hell, they can just go out and get a new job anyway, right? Oh wait …

If the democrats played their cards right they would make a huge deal out of this and start protecting government workers, many of whom are, after all, Real Americans. I’d evoke the Oklahoma City victims and talk about people who work for homeland security, firefighters and nurses.

This right wing war on public employees should accrue to Democrats benefit. After all, there are about 3 million federal employees (not including clandestine workers) and probably just as many in the states. But that requires that they speak up in support of them and call attention to things like Boehner’s comments like Russ Feingold did when Wisconsin Governor Walker declared that he was going to bust the public employee unions and replace them with their neighbors in the National Guard.

And the Green Bay Packers said it better today than any Democrat I’ve seen:

Present and former Green Bay Packers are among those urging the Legislature to reject Governor Scott Walker’s proposed union cutbacks.

Current linebacker Brady Poppinga and offensive lineman Jason Spitz joined 1990’s Super Bowl kicker Chris Jacke and ex-Packers Bob Long, Charles Jordan, Curtis Fuller, and Steve Okoniewski in signing a letter.

The players said they know teamwork on and off the field is what makes the Packers and Wisconsin great – and it’s the same dedication of public workers which makes the state run.

They called the right to negotiate wages and benefits, most of which Walker would take away, a, “fundamental underpinning of our middle class.” And they said the current setup has worked for Wisconsin since the 1930’s.

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Leaderless Revolutions

by digby

There have been a ton of interesting and discussion-provoking articles about what led to the successful protests in Tunisia and Egypt (and potentially ongoing all over the MidEast) but this NY Times story has a detail I hadn’t heard before:

As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.” The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades. They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley… Now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt. “Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” said Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the Jan. 25 protests that set off the uprising. He spoke at a meeting on Sunday night where the members discussed sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran. “If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes,” he said, joking that the next Arab summit might be “a coming-out party” for all the ascendant youth leaders.

There are other great stories of key moments in the Egypt uprising, like this one. But I had not realized the length of time they had been collaborating and I think this suggests a much stronger, organic movement than previously realized. I’ve been skeptical of how this would go beyond protest against the status quo without any kind of political structure or specific leadership, but if this has been growing for a couple of years without it then we may indeed be looking at something quite new. And that’s very exciting.

Of course, it’s exciting anyway, to see people rise up and depose tyrants and despots. But too often they are simply replaced by something just as bad, particularly if there’s a political vacuum. Without a common figure to rally around, the energy dissipates and people begin to argue among themselves leaving an opening for undemocratic forces to take hold. But this may actually be different and it bears watching closely as we see this unfold.

Here are a couple of blog posts I found very thought provoking about the idea of “leaderless” uprisings that you may enjoy if you have also been thinking along these lines. I don’t know quite what to think about it yet, but it’s very, very intriguing.

Can “Leaderless Revolutions” Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks

Why the “how” of social organizing matters and how Gladwell’s latest contrarian missive falls short

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South Dakota Coathanger Brigade

by digby

This defense by the South Dakota legislator who sponsored a bill to make the killing of anyone attempting to harm an unborn child, justifiable homicide, would be a lot more credible if it weren’t for the sordid history of South Dakota’s abortion politics in recent years.
Just recently, there was the proposed law which would have banned abortion even without a sodomized virgin exception and the ongoing long time work of people like Leslee Unruh, the dishonest forced pregnancy zealot who, among other things, created the sick “Purity Balls” for little girls to pledge their virginity to their daddies:

UNRUH:We think that its important for fathers to the be the first ones to look into their daughters eyes and To tell her that her purity is special, and its ok to wait until marriage.

HINOJOSA:It might have all the trapping of a regular prom, but this one ends a little differently.

GIRLS RECITING PLEDGE:”I make a promise this day to God…

HINOJOSA: The young women here all make a promise to their fathers that they won’t have sex until the day they get married.

GIRLS RECITING PLEDGE:…to remain sexually pure…until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. … I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.

When I first wrote about that I noted that it explains why they don’t want an exception for rape or incest …

Here’s a testimonial from Generations of Light magazine:

“How can you measure the value of your eleven year old looking up into your eyes (as you clumsily learn the fox-trot together) with innocent, uncontainable joy, saying, ‘Daddy, I’m so excited!’ wrote Wesley Tullis in a letter describing his grateful participation. ‘I have been involved with the Father-Daughter Ball for two years with my daughters, Sarah and Anna. It is impossible to convey what I have seen in their sweet spirits, their delicate, forming souls, as their daddy takes them out for their first, big dance. Their whole being absorbs my loving attention, resulting in a radiant sense of self-worth and identity. Think of it from their perspective: My daddy thinks I’m beautiful in my own unique way. My daddy is treating me with respect and honor. My daddy has taken time to be silly, and even made a fool of himself, learning how to dance. My daddy really loves me!”

I can understand why the little girls would want to do this. It’s a chance to dress up and spend time with their father. If it were for another purpose, it might be sweet. But this is what that little girl is reading to her father from that card:

I pledge to remain sexually pure…until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. … I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.

And this is what Daddy says in turn:I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.

That is what the anti-abortion movement in South Dakota is all about. They are not about “life” they are about female subjugation. So when I see people like Amy Sullivan, the allegedly progressive “common ground” specialist of the Religion Industrial Complex saying this on twitter, I want to scream:

Good on @ThePlumLineGS and @daveweigel for digging into that SD “justifiable homicide” bill that sounded too crazy to be true. It mostly is.

Of course, it isn’t too crazy to be true. It’s South Dakota, ground zero of the forced childbirth movement.

The idea that this bill isn’t an anti-abortion bill is absurd, and all the reporters did was report the legislators stupid justifications. After all, if a boyfriend abuses his pregnant girlfriend one assumes she already has a right to self-defense. But hey, maybe in South Dakota is legal to beat your girlfriend or wife but they want to give fetuses the right to fight back. It wouldn’t surprise me.

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Village on the rocks

by digby

Oh my God. I think hell froze over int he Village. Talking to Elijah Cummings about all this slashing of discretionary spending in the President’s budget, Andrea Mitchell wondered why he would want to hit the poor but not even touch entitleme — or defense. Cummings said that defense should be looked at and but that social security is not really a problem and that medicare and medicaid should be looked at.

Normally, at this point, the wealthy TV celebrity Mitchell would wax about shared sacrifice and talk about how we all have to give up something for the greater good, just before she suggests cutting Social Security and Medicare. But this time she had a different formulation:

Mitchell: What about means testing? Why not do some means testing and and perhaps start looking at some cutbacks on social security and medicare. But we all know that medicare and medicaid are the big ones. Why not hit those who can afford to pay?Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have said they don’t need to have their Medicare paid for.

Maybe she’s said that before, but I haven’t heard it. And I’ve certainly never heard her say before that social security isn’t the problem, but health care costs are. This is a significant change in her formulation of the problem.

I don’t happen to be in favor of means testing the programs. I think once you take the better off out of it it will deteriorate into a “welfare” program that is far weaker than it is today. That’s just how the plutocrats roll. But this idea that the rich should pay more is means that raising the cap may be taken seriously in the debate and that’s all it would take to fix the SS 2040 gap.

Medicare and Medicaid are far more complicated problems that really relate to health care costs in general and are going to require serious people doing serious things to fix the problem. I’m thinking that’s probably not going to happen in this congress. But if the Village can wrap their minds around the idea the Social Security isn’t where the money is, then we will have made some important progress. (And Pete Peterson will have wasted all that money …)

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Jersey Sore

by digby

Howie Sez:

Last night Forbes Magazine summed up our dilemma: because technically our first ad was inaccurate– we didn’t mention that Lance was still taking government-subsidized healthcare paid for by New Jersey taxpayers through the state plan instead of the far less costly federal congressional plan– we had to stop running it on WCTC, 1450AM in Somerset. “[T]he reason Rep. Lance turned down the federal benefits,” explains Forbes “is because he’s already getting a better policy at a much better deal from the State of New Jersey. As a retiree from the state senate, he qualified for a free Cadillac style health care plan the state provides for retirees and their families (he does have to pay co-pays but no premiums) for life.”

That would be one of the programs that have come under attack by conservative Governor Chris Christie in his battle with public employee unions over the unusually lucrative benefits paid to retiring public servants.

Oops. So much for sacrificing to make a point.

…What is important here is that Rep. Lance and his family are in great shape when it comes to their own health care thanks to the generosity of the taxpayers of New Jersey. As for the Americans who would be denied health coverage by Lance’s repeal vote– coverage that does not even begin to approach the quality of what the good Congressman is receiving for free– well, I guess that’s a personal problem for Americans that Rep. Lance cannot be bothered about.

So… our new ad (above) is ready to go and we’re getting it up on WCTC this week. And we’d like to get it on some other stations as well. Can you help us do that through our ActBlue page?

Back In Business

by digby

Looks like CPAC was the usual charming gathering even without Jim DeMint:

President Barack Obama? Weak, a socialist and a liar. Liberals? Monsters and a cancer. Former Vice President Dick Cheney? Called a war criminal, “murdering scum” and a draft dodger — by people in his own party. Just a month after the Arizona shooting rampage led to bipartisan calls for toned-down political discourse, incivility suffused the year’s largest gathering of conservatives. Just like at most partisan get-togethers on either end of the ideological spectrum. The brief political time out is over — if it ever really existed. “All right, sit down and shut up,” Cheney said after being greeted by hecklers when he made a surprise appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Supporters shouted down the insults with a “U.S.A.” chant, and a visibly annoyed Cheney brushed off the outbursts. Such incivility didn’t overwhelm the conference, which is a rite of passage for presidential contenders, right-leaning media personalities and grass-roots activists. But it kept popping up throughout the three-day affair in speeches by names big and not so big. That’s not to say liberals would have been any more civil at their own event, and the tone at the conservative gathering was arguably no different from what it’s been in the past. After all, it’s what these events are for. On both the left and the right, hard-core ideologues are the ones who attend such conferences, and agendas are set with that audience in mind. Verbal bomb-throwing is the norm from speakers who serve up political red meat to highly partisan crowds that devour it.

You know, it’s fun to make these equivalences, and I’m sure that Jon Stewart will dutifully dredge up a couple of examples of Code Pink yelling something at Donald Rumsfeld to prove that liberals are just as bad. And liberals will dutifully pull back and be more polite while conservatives will laugh and laugh and laugh. But it’s bullshit.

The truth is that this year’s CPAC seems to have been a bit more sedate at least in terms of their usual derogatory, red meat. In the past, they featured adorable stuff like this:

…Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn’t out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged “open warfare” against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called “Tip a Troll,” in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, “The Homosexual Agenda,” “Roe V. Wade” and “The Liberal Media.”

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn’t letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it’s time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled “2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?” Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn’t be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. “One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball,” he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more “bare-knuckle” tactics. The next day, Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, told a rapt crowd about the “well-financed media campaign against the Bush White House.”

The rise of Fox News and talk radio has done little to assuage right-wing resentment toward the supposedly liberal media. “It’s amazing conservatives ever win any victories at all with the left’s hegemonic domination of the media,” Coulter told her listeners. She spent most of her talk mocking antiwar arguments (“Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil”) and antiwar protesters. “Scott Ritter, that’s a liberal for you,” began one bit. “Cleans up, cuts his hair and it turns out that it’s to get underage girls.” Bada-BOOM.

For speakers like Coulter, who performs her act as a kind of stand-up routine, much of this stuff just seems like cynical hyperbole, but among the rank and file, liberal-phobia is real and deep. Virgil Beato, a 25-year-old graduate student at American University, spoke of the “mean-spiritedness” of the left, much of which he’d learned about from David Horowitz (the former Salon columnist). “David Horowitz knows how the left thinks,” Beato proclaimed. “He’s trying to send out the message that sometimes we need to play hardball. That’s the message we’re getting from here.”

And these items they sold at the 2008 CPAC were just delightful. Or the one a couple of years earlier that featured bumper stickers that said “Happiness is Hillary’s face on a milk carton”.
I defy anyone to point out anything like that being sold at a Netroots Nation convention or any other left wing gathering. Certainly, I’ve never seen Democratic politicians saying stuff like they say at CPAC. It’s all we can do to get them to show they have a pulse.

Let’s face it, lefties may get intemperate and hurl some tough rhetoric from time to time but it’s the wingnuts who make a profit at it. And just like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, it’s the nasty derisive junk like this that flies off the shelves:

Budget triangle

by digby

White House stenographer Richard Wolffe was just on Matthews talking about the budget. He says it is a political document designed to appeal to independents who don’t like all the bickering blah,blah, blah. Matthews wondered whether or not this was meant to appeal to people worried about their grandchildren’s future or the 55 year old guy who has lost his job. Wolffe said the president isn’t talking to the unemployed.

Matthews: Ok. Let’s talk about the unions out there, the SEIU, the Steelworkers people like that. The unions, out there the one’s who care about the unemployed, who want to get a larger membership… Are they going to be happy about this?

Wolffe: No. No they’re not. There are going to be too many community grants that

Matthews: CBGs, community block grants…

Wolffe: they just don’t want to see that go down. But actually that kind of criticism is going to help this president. Two thirds of deficit reduction comes from spending cuts.

Matthews: ok, what about infrastructure … putting people back to work replacing the smell of decay, with the smell of construction as I’ve said many times?

Wolffe: It’s about choices. They’re still going to have some money. Republicans are still going to say cut the whole thing.

If one accepts that Wolffe has a very good relationship with the White House and dutifully reports their political calculus (a decent assumption since he makes his living as the official chronicler of Obamaism) then this has the stench of triangulation all over it.

I know there is a strong push to ensure that Obama isn’t tagged with the “t” word and I expect that many of his people truly don’t like the concept. But Wolffe’s reporting certainly suggests that is exactly what they’re doing nonetheless.

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Whistling For Condor

by digby

This is a very interesting article about Bill Keller’s coarse, personal loathing for Julian Assange and I don’t mean to take away from that when I point out that his opening paragraph is misleading.

It starts like this:

It’s the climax of the 1975 hit Three Days of the Condor. On a Manhattan sidewalk fugitive CIA analyst Robert Redford, having outgunned his assassins, confronts his double-dealing boss, who demands he join the sinister plot to control the world’s oil. No way, Redford says, he’s already blown the whistle. And the camera pans across the street where a truckload of newsprint is being delivered – to The New York Times. Game over. Ahh, Hollywood. But what really happens when you’re a major league whistleblower? Say you’ve acquired sensitive documents of huge public importance, very hush-hush. Although it’s bound to annoy powerful people and may expose you to reprisal, you deliver them to the world’s mightiest news media, including The New York Times, which use them in sensational articles that have worldwide impact. The Condor’s triumphant fourth day? Well, no..read on

He goes on to discuss the realities of being a major league whistleblower and why that might turn you into something of a freak. ( It’s my understanding that all major whistleblowers are fairly eccentric if not downright weird — you have to be to do such a thing.)
But the problem is that this is not ending of Three Days of the Condor and the way it actually ended reinforces his thesis (about whistleblowers, if not Hollywood.)Here’s the final scene he describes:

Redford: Well, go on home, Higgins. Go on. They’ve got it.

Higgins: – What?

Redford: You know where we are. Just look around. They’ve got it. That’s where they ship from. They’ve got all of it.

Higgins: What? What did you do?

Redford: I told them a story. You play games, I told them a story.

Higgins:Oh, you–you poor, dumb son of a bitch. You’ve done more damage than you know.

Redford: I hope so.

Higgins: You’re about to be a very lonely man. It didn’t have to end this way.

Redford: Of course it did. (turns away)

Higgins: Hey, Turner … How do you know they’ll print it? You can take a walk, but how far if they don’t print it?

Redford: They’ll print it.

Higgins: How do you know?

That’s the last line of the movie, which the writer acknowledges and correctly ends his own piece with as well, but I think he glibly dismissed the real point of the movie. Perhaps it’s true that when the film was made many people assumed that the New York Times, having recently gone to court to secure the right to print the Pentagon Papers, would of course print Redford’s story. But the film clearly indicated that collusion between the government and the press was just as likely — indeed, the whole thing was dripping with contempt for governing institutions. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the similarity between the 70s and now, particularly in that regard, and I think this is a good example.
Cynicism about the mainstream press has been around a long while, even during the halcyon days of enemies lists and the Pentagon Papers. And generally it’s correct to be skeptical of their motives. There have not really been all that many crusading publishers or muckraking journalists in American history. They’re Big Business enterprises looking out for the bottom line and that rarely upsets the status quo.
I do have to say, however, that Bill Keller’s performance regarding Wikileaks has been one of the most unseemly demonstrations of snotty, aristocratic presumptuousness I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure William Randolph Hearst wouldn’t be embarrassed by it. Even in an era when elites of all stripes are behaving like petulant children, Keller stand out as a prime ass, and that’s saying something.
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